Yesterday we finally got a release date for Supermassive’s upcoming choice-based adventure game, Man of Medan. The game takes place on a ghost ship and uses a choice system similar to 2015’s Until Dawn to create a branching path of options that will lead to multiple playthroughs with vastly different potential outcomes. It is also the first of what is hoped to be five titles in an anthology series called The Dark Pictures. Now the developer has detailed the ambition to release the rest of the games in a timely fashion.
Talking to the PlayStation Blog, Supermassive Games CEO Pete Samuels talked about the game, how its branching path style worked, and how it will give even more possible outcomes than Until Dawn. He also talked about the hopes for the release schedule, and it seems pretty ambitious. He says that three of the five titles are already in development, and that he wants to see two games release per a year-long window- meaning they hope to release at least one more title before August of next year after Man of Medan, if not two. But they’re thinking even beyond the initial five games and have ideas for up to eight different titles across multiple genres.
“We’ve committed ourselves to two games in any 12 month period,” said Samuels. “The first three are well underway and the fourth and fifth are fairly well advanced from a narrative perspective. We even have our ideas in place for the sixth, seventh and eighth! Across all of these, and others to come, we hope, we’d expect to cover many more of the 39 subgenres of horror we’ve identified! We couldn’t be more excited.”
It’s definitely an ambitious plan, and episodic gaming hasn’t been done quite on this scale before, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out. The first in the series, Man of Medan, will release for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC August 30th.
